Tableau Introduces New iPhone App Along with Enhancements to Flagship Platform

Tableau Software is releasing a comprehensive update to its flagship platform, continuing its mission to provide new data preparation improvements, customization for maps, enhanced security, and introducing a new iPhone app.

“Working with data on a small device presents really unique challenges so we thought very deeply about the experience of what you might want to do there and we’re very excited with the iPhone app that’s coming out,” said Ellie Fields, vice president of product marketing at Tableau. Customers in the past could use their iPhones with their Tableau dashboards and visualizations, but the new Tableau Mobile app now makes it easier for people to interact with and access data on the go.

Along with the new app, Tableau is introducing geolocation, making it possible to orient a map around the users’ current location with a simple tap on a Tableau map in a mobile browser or on the Tableau iPad and iPhone app. “This complements the tablet app we released a few months ago and with both of these you see a focus of Tableau on making sure the mobile scenarios are really full, robust, and very touch optimized to have a fluid experience on the phone and tablet,” Fields said.

With the new app, Tableau version 9.2 brings a plethora of security enhancements including a simplified way to set permissions on projects along with offering a new option to lock project permissions to an administrator-defined set, new support for OpenID Connect which automatically signs users into Tableau Server if they are already signed into an OpenID Connect identity provider such as Google, and improvements to the REST APIs to let administrators set, view and remove default permissions for a project and easily control default project permissions programmatically through custom applications and scripts.

“We’re always trying to make the administrators life a little bit easier and make sure people can govern the deployment in the way that they want to,” Fields said. Additionallyversion 9.2 introduces more options for controlling map behavior and unlimited potential for map customization with Mapbox integration in Tableau Desktop. With this new tool users can customize, brand, enhance, and add context to maps. Additionally, Tableau is expanding the support for international postal codes with the addition of Japanese postal codes and other data updates such as U.S. congressional districts.

With these updates come enhancements for Tableau’s data interpreter which now not only cleans Excel spreadsheets, but automatically detects sub-tables and converts them to tables that can be analyzed in Tableau. “I think this release has something for everyone and that core user of the data is really going to be pleased with this release,” Fields said.